wall street pulled biggest scam ever by telling all to buy stks because dollar was so weak. the dollar idnex has been between 70-89 the past 2 years and was right in the exact middle of that range today. if strong $ bad for multinationals why ahven't those stks tanked with a soaring $?
Commodity stocks are very important in this algo-driven program trading market. Now XOM has the largest weight in the S&P 500 index... among other commodities such as CVX, SLB, etc, so whenever these stocks move buy/sell programs go off and carry the market in general. Take notice that commodities stocks are also generally higher priced... thus having a wider trading range... and therefore providing more buy/sell signals (though this is not that important). The main point is that because commodities are dominating the market, they bid up the rest of the market in companies that have less to do with the US dollar's performance. Now what makes commodity related stocks move? Again because of program trading. The reason for this is because commodities, particularly oil, are priced in US Dollars (petrodollars). So when the US $ is going higher, commodities are getting "cheaper". As a result, companies such as XOM receive less revenue. A weaker dollar means commodities are more expensive and XOM is benefiting from higher prices in oil, as is X in steel, etc. Some commodity stocks that are neutral to the US $ also move because the belong to baskets such as the SLX, XME, OIH, etc. There are algos program trading commodities shadowing the moves of the US Dollar... and when commodity stocks are bid up... S&P 500 buy programs come into play and bid up all stocks... including companies like JPM who don't really care how weak/strong the US $ may be. Hope that helps to clarify this a bit.